Factorio Forums

Based on these threads I had a new idea:

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =16&t=6169
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=5&t=4356
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=1277

The problem is: Solar is in the view of some players overpowered, because once it is set up, you don't need to change anything. I'm not at this line yet, but I think that this will become a problem, when the end-game is more clear.

So this is how I think it can bring some useful game-element.

First how it works: The planet is surrounding some kind of big gas planet (it is then of course a moon, but I keep saying planet, to distinct it). And there are also some other moons, orbiting the gas-gigant and eventually the planet. All the orbits can be about random and don't need to be calculated exactly, we can assume, that the orbits are circles, not ellipses, they need not realistic (there are orbits, which are impossible, when using gravitational orbits) and so on.

So, there are some semi-random events:
- The planet comes into the shadow of a moon. This might reduce or cut the produced solar power - depends on distance.
- The planet comes into the shadow of the gas-planet. That will be the biggest problem, cause it might last one or two minutes. Enough to empty all the accus. And it might happen every "year" (I think to 10-20 days).

These events are predictable, if you know the orbits. This goes along with researching of optics and some calculator item, which will display you the orbits and times/length of next eclipse.

EDIT:
This is how the result may look:


A mix between a sun-clock and a planetary modell. The important part: You see your own planet and the shadows of the others. And it moves, while the time runs. And now you can estimate, when you will have an eclipse.
And the idea for this comes from here:

This is the astronomical clock in Prague. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_astronomical_clock


The idea behind this is, that it will bring all your nice setup into chaos. If the biters (or other natives) then also like the night, then this will be a quite adrenalin shocking game element, when it arrives first and with the time the player learns to build setups, which are based on a energy mix. (My opinion)


Other possibilities with those orbits:
- The planet comes near to another moon. That might enable for other unfriendly natives to come along through the space.
- or there is your "enemy", another player, which sends you some "greetings".
- or a coop-player, sending you needed resources, you cannot find on this planet....
- Weather
- Tides
- Short Seasons: The planet goes around the gas-gigant. Depending of the size of the gas-gigant it emits significant amounts of infrared. Summer is then, when the planet is between sun and gas-gigant (at day there is the sun, at night the warmth from the gas-gigant), winter is on the other side, when both is on one side.
- Planet/moon names from player names.
- Usage as resources (crash asteroids)
- extending your factory to other moons.
-...

I must say that I realy like this. This is a realy good idea.

Instead of eclipses I would suggest seasons which last 30 ingame days each and differ in the length of the days so in winter the day is so short that your batteries don't get charged enough to supply your factory with energy during the night.

Additionally the sun doesn't have the power it has in summer during e.g. the winter so it won't charge that efficient during the day.

Nic wrote:Instead of eclipses I would suggest seasons which last 30 ingame days each and differ in the length of the days so in winter the day is so short that your batteries don't get charged enough to supply your factory with energy during the night.

Well, that are the long seasons! 30 days... hm. Ok, it must not be realistic (and an orbit of only 10 days is quite near to an gas gigant, it would normally break such a planet because of the tide-powers, but I think the game needs not to be really realistic here).

Short seasons: The orbit around an infrared emitting gas-gigant, caused by it's "shining" in the night. On equator it will be significantly colder in short-winter, too!
Long seasons: Like our earth dependent on the angle of the axis of the planet to the sun. At the equator there is nearly always the same temperature.

Totally OK with these ideas, which I'd like to be able to set into the starting screen. Maybe day/night proportion ruler, and frequency of eclipses ruler ?

Thought: If the eclipse lasts only a minute or two, whats to stop players from combating it by increasing accumulator storage? If it's a reliable schedule, all you'd need to get power through it with solar is enough solar panels to charge up over the ten day interim period and enough accumulators to deal with the lack. I don't get the feeling that this would solve the solar problem, just change the ratios of accumulators to panels and increase the total amount needed.

Well, when things go bad you have two or more eclipses per day (2 moons and one from the gad gigant). If you can choose how many moons the system will have, you choose also the "randomness" of eclipses. Perhaps you have luck and the eclipses come all in night, where it doesn't hurt. But there is a quite big risk (this must be balances), that you underestimate the risk and when you see, that there are 3 eclipses in a row it is nearly to late.

I think the best part is then playing with this risk.

ssilk wrote:that there are 3 eclipses in a row it is nearly to late.

And when biters experience three eclipses in a row, there's a chance they'll become agitated and more aggressive

How about instead implementing weather.

Hm. I see the whole stuff, like

- weather
- seasons
- eclipses
- tides
- and there are more such stuff:
--- asteroids,
--- sun-flares
--- and all other events, which you cannot influence (another race comes in to dig resources on this planet, pirates, etc.)

as one big theme "unswayable events or changes" - things, which cannot be influenced by the player, but the player needs (eventually) to react on them.

It's impossible to live on moon of a gas giant. Gravitational tidal forces of gas giant are so big that they cause tides inside moon like if it was water, doing insane heating and massive volcanic eruptions everywhere, so i wouldn't want to live there, nope.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_heating

So making this kind of gameplay total hardcore because there would not be biters. Maybe if it was in further orbit, it would be ok? I guess you can have volcanic unstable worlds with 100m tides that you just ninja land mine and gtfo.

I think a better and simpler solution would just have solar output be randomized, day to day. Yes you could add in climate, seasonal changes, eclipses and so forth, but IMO it would be easier to understand if it was simply "Every day, your solar panels' output is randomized from 10-70kw." You could have it adjustable in the world creation options, and maybe add in some additional settings, like a limit to the day to day difference in output (So if you set it to a 20kw range, it won't be 70kw one day and 10kw the next, it would have to be more like 70kw day 1, 50kw day 2, 30kw day 3, and 10kw day 4). Don't get me wrong your idea sounds cool but this would probably get the same effective result and should be pretty damn easy to implement.



Also, one more thing that would add to the game would be to have the amount of pollution affect the output of solar panels on top of this randomization. So if you had a ton of pollution and plopped down a panel in the middle of your factory, it would lose say up to 80-95% of it's output due to all the smog. It would add in another dimension to the game and require you to build your solar farms far away from polluting sources. Better yet, it would not hurt solar panels much in the early game where they are not so overpowered as there is only enough pollution to knock a couple percent off of its output even if you place it in your factory.

xnmo wrote:Also, one more thing that would add to the game would be to have the amount of pollution affect the output of solar panels on top of this randomization. So if you had a ton of pollution and plopped down a panel in the middle of your factory, it would lose say up to 80-95% of it's output due to all the smog. It would add in another dimension to the game and require you to build your solar farms far away from polluting sources. Better yet, it would not hurt solar panels much in the early game where they are not so overpowered as there is only enough pollution to knock a couple percent off of its output even if you place it in your factory.

Okay, I don't like a lot of the straight stat nerfs to solar, they feel like simple disadvantages that don't do anything to solve solar's lack of complexity, but this? This is great.

...

Would anyone mind if I compiled this and a number of other solar suggestions in a balance thread?

cpy wrote:It's impossible to live on moon of a gas giant. Gravitational tidal forces of gas giant are so big that they cause tides inside moon like if it was water, doing insane heating and massive volcanic eruptions everywhere, so i wouldn't want to live there, nope.

It is impossible to live on a moon with only 7 minutes days, the centrifugal power would for a 4000 km in diameter sized moon would be over 200 g.

I don't give here anything to physical correctness. Yes, we have effects, and when possible it should be exact (see for example the whole power managament), but everything is less important then the gameplay. To be physical correct I calculated that a factorio day must last about 1 hour to avoid having planets/moons, where the air is just spinned off. I think everybody will understand, that 1 hour for a day would be a really boring game...

xnmo wrote:I think a better and simpler solution would just have solar output be randomized, day to day. ... this would probably get the same effective result and should be pretty damn easy to implement.

Hm. The point in this suggestion is, that you can predict the amount. You have something like a simulator/calculator, where you can fast forward the rotation of the moons/planet around the gas gigant and see and it will warn you a day before an eclipse comes.

[quote[Also, one more thing that would add to the game would be to have the amount of pollution affect the output of solar panels on top of this randomization. So if you had a ton of pollution and plopped down a panel in the middle of your factory, it would lose say up to 80-95% of it's output due to all the smog. It would add in another dimension to the game and require you to build your solar farms far away from polluting sources. Better yet, it would not hurt solar panels much in the early game where they are not so overpowered as there is only enough pollution to knock a couple percent off of its output even if you place it in your factory.[/quote]
Hm. This is indeed a nice idea. The acids from the smog will slowly break down the solar panels, you need to clean/repair them much more as if you put them far away and you get more power.

Boring game? I have day and night extender and my day last almost an hour, every other game i play have 1 hour day too. I have 5x longer day 7x longer night. Short day and nights are boring for me.

ssilk wrote:On equator.

Aren't the maps infinite? (I never ventured off very far but quite far)

If they are finite I am a little bit sad since I will sooner or later hit the border of it when ressources are depleted in the center.

The maps are as big, as you computer can handle. When you generate a new map turn off the map limits...

If we assume, that one tile is one meter size (https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/index.php?title=Tile ) and we also assume, that it takes - hm, I really guess (!) - about 10 bytes to store one tile, then a 16 Gig RAM computer can handle an area of:


16 GiG = 17179869184 Byte = 1717986918,4 tiles

The root is 41448.61 square meters, which means, a quadratic area is 41.5 kilometers long, thats about 25,75 miles. This is bit less then the Pitcairn Islands. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... es_by_area)

Or about this size of Bermuda: https://www.google.de/maps/place/Bermud ... 697679,14z

ssilk wrote:The maps are as big, as you computer can handle. When you generate a new map turn off the map limits...

If we assume, that one tile is one meter size (https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/index.php?title=Tile ) and we also assume, that it takes - hm, I really guess (!) - about 10 bytes to store one tile, then a 16 Gig RAM computer can handle an area of:


16 GiG = 17179869184 Byte = 1717986918,4 tiles

The root is 41448.61 square meters, which means, a quadratic area is 41.5 kilometers long, thats about 25,75 miles. This is bit less then the Pitcairn Islands. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... es_by_area)

Or about this size of Bermuda: https://www.google.de/maps/place/Bermud ... 697679,14z

Good to know that, so the whole equator thing is not that far fetched as I thought.
I luckily have 32GB of RAm where around 6 to 7 GB get used by other things like the OS etc.

Nic wrote:Good to know that, so the whole equator thing is not that far fetched as I thought.
I luckily have 32GB of RAm where around 6 to 7 GB get used by other things like the OS etc.

Thing is you don't actually need to store anything in memory for each and every tile, just what objects exists, the boundaries between different environments and the parameters used to procedurally generate the environment from those boundaries.

Why not just make a Thunder/Lightning system which are attracted to things like accumulators? On top of that a rain system when it is raining and thundering
things can get nasty for accumulators, seeing as they emit electricity around itself when it is (dis-)charging. Of course there should be a option giving the player a chance to negate the effect somehow instead of crushing him entirely due to unpredictable weather events.

I hope the solar-panels don't get nerfed to the point where spamming steam-machine instead becomes a viable option instead.

The smog system sounds nice as well so it forces the player to place his solar-farm on a clean environment seeing as less light can penetrate through a thick smog cloud.